ZOMBIES IN HIS PAST, NOW ONTO COPS

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In preparing for “Mob City,” a fictional look at the seedy underbelly of 1940s-era Los Angeles and his first new television series in three years, Frank Darabont has had to excise other favorite TV shows and movies from his regular cultural diet.

Gone were dramas like HBO's “Boardwalk Empire,” which is set in an earlier era than “Mob City” but also deals with the roots of organized crime, as well as thrillers like “L.A. Confidential,” which could be a source of distraction or envy to anyone looking to cover similar turf.

Nor has he been keeping up with the AMC series “The Walking Dead,” but that is for a very different reason.

“It's not easy to get your heart broken, and it takes a while to recover,” Darabont said recently. “It's too sad for me to look at it, at this moment.”

As much as Darabont is remembered for writing and directing moralistic period dramas like “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” and horror films like “The Mist,” a part of him will be forever connected to “The Walking Dead.”

He adapted that TV series, about human survivors in a world overrun by zombies, from the comic book, and ran the show for about 1½ wildly popular seasons. Then, in its second year, he was fired, amid what colleagues say was the abrupt and needless resolution to a budgetary dispute with AMC.

With “Mob City” (which begins an unconventional six-episode, three-week season on TNT on Dec. 4), Darabont is hoping to put the bitterness of his “Walking Dead” experience behind him and immerse himself in another genre filled with desperate characters, squalid settings and occasional outbursts of violence.

A modern-day tribute to the venerable film noir is no sure thing, in the way that undead apocalypses have come to be, and not an easy fit for TNT, a network better known for crime procedurals like “Rizzoli & Isles.”

But Darabont knows only one way to create, which is to throw himself into a project wholeheartedly, and, as he said, only one solution to “deal with any vast disappointment: You do your best to get over it.”

Speaking by Skype from Los Angeles, Darabont, 54, a man with a round, bald head and a mischievous goatee, took occasional drags from an electronic cigarette that glowed red as he spoke about the stylized mystery and crime films he grew up on.

Whether it was “Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard” or “anything in black and white with high-key lighting,” Darabont said, “I found it to be such a specialized world, no less than, say, Altair IV in ‘Forbidden Planet.' “

He was less inclined to discuss the circumstances that led to his departure from “The Walking Dead,” saying, “Suffice to say, there was some conflict that couldn't be resolved.”

In the summer of 2011, he appeared at Comic-Con International in San Diego to promote “The Walking Dead,” which was then drawing nearly 6 million viewers an episode. (It is now watched by more than 13 million.) Days later, AMC fired Darabont, leaving his co-workers stunned.

“I likened it to a Marine grunt seeing his beloved captain felled by a sniper,” said Gregory Melton, the former production designer of “The Walking Dead,” who also worked on “Mob City.” “It was just that fast. We're leaderless.”

Melton said that Darabont and AMC had clashed over the network's imposition of a “draconian budget cut” to “The Walking Dead,” which “dictated a whole different type of show than Frank had envisioned.”

Darabont did not have a new project yet, but soon found one in John Buntin's nonfiction book “L.A. Noir,” which chronicles the ascents of the principled police Chief William Parker and his nemesis, the gangster Mickey Cohen.

Thus began the story of the fictional “Mob City” protagonist Joe Teague (played by Bernthal), a World War II veteran and Marine turned Los Angeles cop, who is “trying to find true north on his moral compass, in a world where the compass readings are all haywire,” Darabont said.

The series, which also features Neal McDonough as Parker, Jeremy Luke as Cohen, Edward Burns as Bugsy Siegel, as well as former “Walking Dead” cast members like DeMunn and Andrew Rothenberg, is not tongue in cheek.

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